My discussion with Wes Adams explored one of the most important questions in leadership today: how purpose translates into performance. Wes co-authored Meaningful Work: How to Ignite Passion and Performance in Every Employee with Tamara Miles, and our conversation kept returning to a simple claim with big implications: meaning isn’t a soft perk. It’s the upstream driver of the outcomes leaders care about most.
“We’ve been doing research at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years now on meaning at work,” Wes told me. He walked through the chain reaction he sees in the data and in practice: when people believe their work matters, job satisfaction rises, well-being improves, engagement and productivity climb, and organizations see more innovation and stronger results. Rather than chasing each outcome separately, leaders can go upstream.
The book organizes those upstream levers into three sources of meaning Wes calls the Three Cs: Community, Contribution, and Challenge. Before we got into tactics, he added one more foundation: Alignment. If your values aren’t real in daily behavior and systems, you’ll puncture meaning faster than any team-building exercise can repair it.
Every Job Can Offer Moments of Meaning
Wes pushes back on the idea that only certain roles are meaningful. “There are potentially really impactful moments of meaning that can happen in every job, every day,” he said. You don’t need to be curing cancer to feel that your work is worthwhile. You do need to know where to look, and leaders have an outsized role in helping people find those moments.
He offered a story from a Microsoft data center workshop. Keisha worked on cloud operations during the early days of the pandemic. The work felt mundane and the risk felt high. “She was thinking about quitting,” Wes recalled. Through a guided reflection, she connected her daily tasks to the world those servers were enabling. Video calls that kept families together. Remote classrooms that kept kids learning. Information-sharing that helped researchers race toward a vaccine. “She realized it was critical infrastructure and she was really responsible for connecting people rather than just wires.” She wrote that reminder on a Post-it and stuck it on her monitor. It didn’t make every day perfect, but it reframed the work.
That story became a visual inspiration for the book’s cover and a practical reminder that meaning often shows up as a series of specific, nameable moments. And leaders can help people find them.
Alignment Comes First
Wes and Tamara’s research surfaced a striking finding: leadership behavior and organizational structures account for roughly half of how meaningful people find their work. That’s both a responsibility and an opportunity. It also revealed a failure mode. “There was another element that came up in the research, which we call alignment,” Wes said. “It didn’t add a lot of meaning to have it, but if you didn’t have it, it was the quickest way to destroy meaning.”
He described alignment as “values made real.” Do leaders behave in line with what’s written on the wall? Do incentives, processes, and rituals reinforce what the company claims to value? “Are you saying that you value teamwork, but incentivizing people with bonuses for their individual performance that maybe take them away from teamwork?” he asked. Without alignment, the Three Cs don’t stick. But with it, they compound.
From Architect to Gardener
One of my favorite parts of the conversation was a metaphor that runs through the book: leaders are gardeners. “Earlier in my career, I really approached my work like an architect,” Wes said. “It’s my job to figure out the right thing to do, to create the structures and to draw up the blueprint.” That mindset works for individual contributors whose impact is anchored in technical excellence. It breaks down when your job is enabling other people to excel.
“Leading is about enabling other people,” he said. Gardeners don’t force growth. They create the conditions for it. Sun, soil, and space. In leadership terms, those map to the Three Cs. The move from architect to gardener is a shift in identity and skill. You’re still designing, but you’re designing conditions more than tasks.
C1: Community
Belonging fuels collaboration, so managers must be intentional about connection.
If your team feels more disconnected today, you’re not imagining it. “We’ve seen a decrease in community,” Wes said. The culprits are familiar: fewer unplanned interactions, more scheduled calls, less hallway talk. In remote and hybrid environments, connection doesn’t happen by accident. “You actually have to plan these things,” he said.
Wes shared a simple practice called The Full Story, popularized by Dr. Vivek Murthy. At the start of each weekly meeting, one person brings an object and tells a short story about it. Five minutes, one person, one personal artifact. It sounds small, but it proves powerful. “People were collaborating more,” Wes said. “They felt better about calling each other if they had a problem or needed some advice.”
He also highlighted a survey item that strongly predicts community: “My leader cares about what’s happening in my life outside of work.” Asking about someone’s weekend, following up, and actually listening are small acts that carry outsized weight.
Rituals amplify belonging, too. Wes pointed to cultural artifacts like a Noogler hat for new Googlers or other initiation-style moments. “It makes you feel a part of the group,” he said. Shared experiences, even as simple as a coffee run, create connective tissue that teams can draw on when work gets hard.
C2: Contribution
Show people the impact they’re making and they’ll make more of it.
Wes admitted the next lesson surprised him with its simplicity and power. Positive feedback changes behavior, buffers burnout, and deepens meaning. “There’s recent research from Gallup and WorkHuman showing that one thank you once a week from a manager was enough to cut disengagement and burnout in half,” he said. Yet fewer than half of employees feel adequately recognized.
To help leaders get better at this, he teaches the BEST feedback model:
- Behavioral: Name the specific thing the person did.
- Explicit: Explain why it mattered and how it impacted you or the work.
- Strengths-based: Call out the capability you saw in them.
- Timely: Say it soon after the moment, not months later.
He modeled it for me in real time and I could feel the difference. Specificity makes praise credible, and credibility makes it repeatable.
The book also includes a Moments That Matter exercise. The prompt is to recall a concrete, specific experience at work that felt meaningful, and then identify what made it meaningful. “Meaning comes from taking a step back and reflecting,” Wes said. Those reflections become fuel people can return to during tougher stretches.
C3: Challenge
Aligned autonomy is the sweet spot between chaos and control.
Wes loves examples like Pinterest’s “Makeathon” and Google’s “20 percent time” because they illustrate how autonomy and experimentation unlock energy. He’s also clear that leaders can’t just declare autonomy and walk away. “There’s this balance between too much autonomy and micromanaging,” he said. His answer is aligned autonomy.
Aligned autonomy starts with clear values and goals. Values give boundaries and guardrails. Goals define outcomes while leaving room on methods. “Being more goal oriented than task oriented is a way to do that,” he said.
He lit up describing the Ritz-Carlton case. The company teaches values deeply during onboarding, then gives people authority to act on them in the moment. If a guest has a problem, any employee can fix it on the spot, with real discretion. The lesson is portable. You may not hand out a corporate card with the same limit, but you can give frontline people clarity, trust, and tools that let them act fast for customers.
Wes pointed to similar micro-autonomy at places like Chick-fil-A and Pret a Manger, where cashiers can comp an item or adjust a bill to solve a problem without tracking down a manager. The principle is the same. Values plus goals plus discretion. That mix invites people to stretch and learn, which is where the meaning in challenge lives.
The Prerequisite: Decent Work
There’s a necessary floor that too many conversations about meaning skip past. “You have to give people the basics,” Wes said. A livable wage, human respect, and reasonable hours. If people are running between three jobs or being ground down by a lack of dignity, it’s hard to access meaning no matter how well you craft rituals or feedback scripts. Leaders who want to grow meaning need to start by making work decent.
One Thing You Can Do This Week
I asked Wes to give listeners a single, practical move. He didn’t hesitate. “Say ‘thank you’ to someone and tell them what they did and why it was important to you,” he said. It costs nothing, requires no budget, and creates ripple effects. He added a second move on the community side: ask someone about life outside of work and follow up with genuine interest.
Learning With a Partner
Wes closed with a reflection on partnership. Working with Tamara has stretched him, sharpened his empathy, and reminded him that having the right answer isn’t the same as taking the right path. “You really have to think about different people, different perspectives, be adaptable, and always be learning,” he said. It fits the gardener theme. Growth and learning are relational.
Where to Go Next
You can find the tools Wes mentioned, including the Moments That Matter canvas and a self-assessment for the Three Cs, at makeworkmeaningful.com. He and co-author Tamara are active on LinkedIn and Instagram.
What I’m Taking Back to My Team
Three practices from Wes are going straight onto my roadmap:
- Make connection a habit, not a hope. Use a five-minute ritual like The Full Story at the start of weekly meetings. Ask about life outside of work and listen for real.
- Deliver BEST feedback weekly. Keep it Behavioral, Explicit, Strengths-based, and Timely. Aim for at least one thank you per person per week.
- Create aligned autonomy. Clarify values and goals, then give discretion where it matters most so people can solve problems and learn in the flow of work.
The gardener image will stick with me. Leaders can’t force meaning, but we can prepare the soil and make sure there’s sun and space. Do that with consistency and integrity and you’ll see something grow that’s good for people and good for performance.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.